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Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

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Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#521

Post by kaitai »

lr4444lr wrote: post #489
pm90 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very enlightening when people who find issue with my expression let me know about it in a friendly way. I think the commenter took a lot of care to phrase their concern in a very nice way; when people do this to me I thank them. It’s the only way that I can keep learning how the language changes with time.

If matt_morgan has concern, matt_morgan can personalize his concern, not preach about what's "painless, traditional-grammar-friendly" generally to all. I don't find that friendly, I find it intrusive.

I always find it so interesting that a full-out flamewar is just fun, while a side comment about improving communication is "intrusive". This is the internet, my friend...

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#522

Post by gen220 »

hintymad wrote: post #323
bdcravens wrote: post #205

Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers work…

It's not about in unicorns or not. It's about the scope and impact of your projects, both of which have more to do with the size than the PR status of a company. When the quantity of people in a company exceeds the quantity of work, you'll be much more expendable. Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. J…

I agree this is a great way to think about it. At the end of the day “business impact” per employee is the thing that matters most to your individualized risk. If your expertise is essential to the continued improvement of the company’s core business model, you have nothing to fear.

It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.

This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).

However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#523

Post by bigiain »

MattGaiser wrote: post #315
trhway wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Urgent" ,"Critically Important", etc. is the most recent whatever caught the attention of a typical S/E/VP with the attention span of a ferret long enough for him/her to be able to utter it in the words. If you're able to highly visibly jump and demonstrate activity during exact that moment - a great talent leading to advancements/promotions - there is no point to react as the next new "critical" directive/change o…

I am shocked at how often I can just ignore an annoying email and have the issue go away...

"Never put of until tomorrow anything you can get out of altogether"

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#524

Post by kaitai »

eadmund wrote: post #446
matt_morgan wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral. It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable. One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case. I think that language…

Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equal, haha".

Makes me think of Ismo and the word "ass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#525

Post by kaitai »

jonluca wrote: post #9

Dara's email was really well written, and felt as compassionate as one can for a letter from a CEO announcing job cuts. The full email: Team Uber: These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly…

Thanks for posting this. It's been interesting to see Uber's engagement with its other businesses (like freight): they've been running trucks at a loss for several years now, it seems, and folks have wondered how long this can continue. That's a funny thing about Uber and more generally VC cash -- it can really cause 'artificial distortions' in industries. Will these layoffs reduce some of these distortions and return some of these industries to for-profit vs for-profit, instead of loss-leader vs normal business?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#526

Post by michaelcampbell »

brown9-2 wrote: post #484
MisterPea wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think that's one of the benefits of microservices actually. Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.

Why reimplement what is already implemented? This is busywork.

Hahahah... ever worked at a big company?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#527

Post by mabbo »

dmaskasky wrote: post #242

I was also let go today, is anyone looking for a frontend engineer with 6 years experience? My profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmaskasky/

Amazon hasn't even slowed down. And if you've seen the front ends we've made, you know there's a lot of need for a good front end developer!

Seriously, we're hiring everywhere and we're optionally wfh until October. We remotely interview and onboard.

www.amazon.jobs, or email me at at dot com. Happy to help direct you.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#528

Post by arghzzz »

LaGrange wrote: post #498
serf wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for. statements like this are not useful for building understanding. rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought. Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement. What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for…

> statements like this are not useful for building understanding. I don't ask you to "understand," honestly I'm not sure if I even particularly want you to. I want you to _respect_ us, and others. And no, understanding is not a precondition to respect. By insisting on using exclusive language, or even by framing otherwise inclusive language as exclusive, you are showing lack of such respect. And true understanding is…

I do hope you know that it’s never intentional. I’m definitely not excluding any gender when I think of the concept of “man hours”—it’s just an abbreviation for “human” to me. I try to use gender neutral language where ever I can, whenever I think of it... I end my meetings with “thanks everyone” rather than “thanks guys”, even though “guys” just means people to me. But it can be stressful to always have to worry about the different intentions people can put behind words, even if none are meant. Basically I think trying to use more gender neutral language is a great thing, but we also shouldn’t criticize it every time it’s seen. I think it’s fair to assume we all have good intentions and that we’re not secretly sexist.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#529

Post by Rebelgecko »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #428
sandworm101 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't alter quotes, even for PC reasons. And If I am going to reuse language for effect I am not going to make changes unless they add to the point I am making. The first comment said man-years and I stuck with that as I wasn't trying to correct their gender grammar. Also, "person-year" is vague as "persons" includes non-humans entities such as corporations and partnerships. "Man-year" refers only to work by biolog…

sde-year, dev-year, engineer-year, resource-year, employee-year, are all variants I've heard before. I can understand not wanting to miss-quote something, but otherwise seems simple enough to use different language.

While those variants solve some complaints, they're a lot more specific and may change the meaning of some statements. For example, many of those terms exclude work that isn't done by "engineers". Using a term like "employee-hours" might make contractors on your team feel less valued.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#530

Post by JCharante »

sandworm101 wrote: post #409
matt_morgan wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't alter quotes, even for PC reasons. And If I am going to reuse language for effect I am not going to make changes unless they add to the point I am making. The first comment said man-years and I stuck with that as I wasn't trying to correct their gender grammar. Also, "person-year" is vague as "persons" includes non-humans entities such as corporations and partnerships. "Man-year" refers only to work by biolog…

Since people don't like the man part of human, what if we started saying hu-years? Hu is still only one syllable.
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